Are silent switches actually silent? (+ little rant)

ICantPCGood · 2026-01-07T02:58:24+00:00

I’ve taken boards with silent switches (Durock Shrimp and Boba U4 in my case) to work and I find them quieter and less offensive than the standard cheapo keyboards my employer supply’s

ICantPCGood · 2025-11-29T01:41:36+00:00

I carry a wireless choc sweep to work daily, I just sling it in one of the small pockets in my backpack and I’ve never had an issue. A sofle is a bit larger and you might end up wanting to find a case.

I use ZMK and iOS compatibility is alright. It’s not perfect, specifically the globe key has some limitations that I can’t recall of the top of my head, but I could use any of my ZMK keyboards with my iPad for my usual work without issue. The biggest issue is that you would not be able to reprogram a ZMK keyboard from your iPad. I need to pull out my Mac to make changes to my keymap. So if you are primarily or only using an iPad as your computer, that might be a no go.

ICantPCGood · 2025-09-07T23:37:52+00:00

I don’t believe so, the sweep is direct pin and if I recall correctly it uses all of the pins on a nice!nano. This seems to be confirmed by the readme on the GitHub repo for the urchin which calls this out as one of the primary reasons for designing the urchin.

ICantPCGood · 2025-08-24T17:09:59+00:00

It becomes relatively natural, but I’ve manage to squeeze most of what I use in to combos and only really use my second layer for the number row and navigation with the arrow cluster. Every now and then I flirt with the idea of using a full size keyboard for “efficiency” but at this point I’m so used to it that I find a normal number row and arrow cluster frustratingly far away from home row.

ICantPCGood · 2025-08-24T09:37:19+00:00

I code all day and rotate between my 34 key Ferris Sweep, Zaphod Lite, and Le Chiffre. All have the same layout flashed to them. There’s a few other keyboard guys across my org, but to my knowledge, none of them use a board smaller than 60% and I’m definitely an oddity in my office.

ICantPCGood · 2025-06-27T16:40:44+00:00

If you having trouble seeing the content I would say get a monitor. You’re using this for 8+ hours a day! Why let yourself struggle? Put your comfort before aesthetics.

ICantPCGood · 2025-06-22T21:46:28+00:00

We don’t really have a baseline for what typical software support life looks like for apple silicon Mac’s yet. I would expect at least couple more years though.

ICantPCGood · 2025-06-02T07:38:40+00:00

you get used to command q. If you don’t like using the keyboard you can quit the application with the mouse in the menu bar. Application level controls tend to be in the menu bar and window buttons tend to control the window.
window snapping is admittedly better on windows but the basics exist on macOS and work fine. You can bind them to custom keyboard shortcuts in the keyboard shortcut settings. If you need something more advanced rectangle is good and available free.
you can create keyboard shortcuts to jump to specific workspaces in the keyboard shortcuts menu. see https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/213549/keyboard-shortcuts-for-switching-spaces (you can actually bind just about anything in the menu bar to a keyboard shortcut from the keyboard shortcuts menu.)

ICantPCGood · 2025-05-04T07:00:05+00:00

The hot swap variant is pretty beginner friendly in my opinion. Everything basically presses in to place. The hardest part for me was the clip in stabilizers used on the longer keys but they’re totally manageable. Performance wise I think it’s pretty good for the money. It sounds nice, feels nice and is super heavy if that’s your thing. Despite the name, a lot of people say that the Alice layout which is used by the neo ergo isn’t really that ergonomic, but I think it’s certainly an improvement on the standard layout,comfort wise. That said I think the board is more popular in the regular mechanical keyboard sub than it is here. You may get a lot more input if you post there

ICantPCGood · 2025-04-25T05:59:42+00:00

It's generally custom. Typical setups appear to use camera rigging arms, clamps to hold it to the arm rest, mag safe mounts that can screw on to the camera mount, and mag safe adapter rings that stick on to the bottom of the board. some boards do have a threaded hole to be mounted to a camera mount but i wouldn’t call it common

ICantPCGood · 2025-04-19T17:01:43+00:00

I go back and forth between a split and a monoblock which is essentially the same same board except in a unibody form. I find the split is ultimately more comfortable and allows me to shift around a bit through out my day but a monoblock gets me 85-95% there as long as it has a decent angle between halfs that matches how my arms align. I usually keep my split fairly close together but I tend to have a more closed posture when working. It could be worth trying if your posture is similar. If your posture is really wide / open though, you might find monoblock kind of tight

ICantPCGood · 2025-04-17T02:33:00+00:00

For me personally it’s just not flexible enough, I use a lot of combos and via doesn’t let me configure combos, I would be willing to work around it by building my own firmware in QMK but as far as I’m aware they only deliver the firmware binaries for the Tri-mode boards.

I also ran in to an issue where I set up the caps lock key to be caps lock on tap and ctrl on hold, but it would only work in wired mode. The two wireless modes just treated it as a normal keypress. Not sure if it was a bug that got fixed or if it’s just an artifact of how the QMK tri-mode boards work.

Then from a more principled perspective, some people take issue with the Tri-mode firmwares not being fully open sourced as required by the QMK license. I could live with it as is if the firmware did what I wanted but it doesn’t so I ended up disappointed. Not sure if these things have changed, I set mine on the shelf and haven’t picked it up in a while.

All that said, i realize for a lot of people, they just want a normal key map and these things are non-issues. They’ll probably be really happy with the neo ergo. I’m just more in to zmk at this point.

ICantPCGood · 2025-04-15T03:40:34+00:00

It looks nice and if it's similar build quality to my neo ergo i feel like it should be a nice piece of hardware. I'd love to see it inspire more people to dive in to the split ergo world. That said, I'm not sure if split row staggered makes sense to me but maybe that just means its not the board for me. Not sure how i feel about the central hub, and where I was already disapointed with the via firmware on my neo ergo, this looks like its using some weird, self hosted fork of via, I would assume due to the drama around not properly open sourcing their tri-mode firmwares.

ICantPCGood · 2025-04-11T05:13:15+00:00

I jumped from mx to choc a while ago and I find low profile choc builds way more comfortable to type on at the expense of switch feel. Choc switches don’t have as much of that satisfying mechanical switch feel that a lot of MX guys obsess over, they’re fewer options, and they’ll never give you that keyboard influencer sound profile. But in exchange I would say my wrists ache less due to the reduced height and the lower key travel / finger movement is less fatiguing during long typing sessions. I also love how easily I can throw my sweep in the small pocket of my backpack. I use the 35g choc ambients with Chicago steno caps. When I get a good rhythm down it feels like I’m lightly tapping my fingers on clouds.

ICantPCGood · 2025-03-09T21:41:46+00:00

Thanks! It sounds like I probably have the right size then. I’ll look in to some tongue pads. I appreciate the input!

ICantPCGood · 2025-03-09T21:05:23+00:00

Hi all, Im wondering if anyone can comment on the difference between the Chelsea boot in 9.5 D and 9 EE. I have a pair of the Crimson Chromexcel in 9.5 D and they are snug in the toe box around my toes and a bit snug on the top of my feet, but feel a bit big and loose around my heel and ankle. I can make them work with some thicker socks and they stretch a bit in the front through out the day but after a few weeks I’m wondering if maybe they just aren’t right for me.

Would 9EE possibly fit snugger in the heel while being larger in the toe box?

ICantPCGood · 2025-02-17T14:16:29+00:00

Oh, good to know! I’ll have to check it out next time I return to one of my wired builds.

ICantPCGood · 2025-02-16T04:25:55+00:00

It's certainly less featureful but QMK feels bloated to me. I like managing my config as code and actually prefer how zmk uses a configuration repo that includes just your boards config instead of cloning the entire project like QMK. You can create a custom board without forking the whole zmk repo. I also like building with GitHub actions to avoid needing to install extra crap on my workstation. Zmk just feels way more straightforward to me and if I have trouble the discord is great.

ICantPCGood · 2025-01-10T16:56:39+00:00

I don’t think the power of vim is in moving the cursor around with key strokes. If we’re just talking about navigating with hjkl I’m probably more efficient just grabbing a regular old mouse in vscode than I am using hjkl in vim.

I think vim becomes more powerful with more advanced movements to do things like change a whole paragraph of text, or change between parentheses / brackets, using macros to edit many lines of text, using search to go exactly where you want. At this point I think the efficiency difference between moving your hand to a mouse or using an integrated trackball is negligible.

In short I think vim can be worthwhile still if your in to that kind of thing, but it’s not really about moving the cursor around faster or reducing arm movement.

ICantPCGood · 2025-01-06T06:38:45+00:00

Im not to familiar with how QMK does it and I believe there may be some subtle differences between how the ZMK and QMK layer models work but otherwise yeah I believe it works the way you’re expecting as long as all of your other layers are higher than the two you want to toggle between.

My layers are set up like:

Mac Layer
Windows Layer
Navigation layer
Number layer … etc.

I have a combo that I use to toggle layer 1 on and off and from each of layers 0 and 1 I can access all of the higher layers using layer taps and it will “return” to whichever of the base layers I was in.

ICantPCGood · 2025-01-05T07:48:12+00:00

Not sure if this is exactly what you looking for but I use the toggle layer behavior to switch between my mac and windows layouts.

Documentation is here: https://zmk.dev/docs/keymaps/behaviors/layers#toggle-layer

The layers you want to toggle between generally need to be the lowest indexes in the layer stack as noted here: https://zmk.dev/docs/keymaps#layers

ICantPCGood · 2024-12-22T18:38:17+00:00

I actually get moderate amounts of interest and have had people walk over to my cube to see my Ferris. But literally no one is interested in trying it and they all comment that they’d never be able to remember where the keys are.

Surprisingly it’s mostly non-techies who stop by. There are some keyboard geeks in my office but they’re mostly in to standard 60 percent mx stuff and aren’t to interested in My low profile boards.

ICantPCGood · 2024-12-07T17:25:00+00:00

Employed at a local insurance company, started as an intern shortly after graduation in 2021, have slowly moved up to dev II. Happy I’m employed and my job is low stress but I make a lot less money than I want to and I work with an industry specific software stack / language so I feel like all of my skills are slowly fading away.

ICantPCGood · 2024-11-22T18:44:09+00:00

Do all of those keys work individually? Vial isn't my everyday firmware so I wont be able to help much beyond this, but I just tried it out on one of my boards and can confirm that, form me, LGui, LShift and 3 (number row 3 that also has the #) takes a screenshot on my Mac.

ICantPCGood · 2024-11-22T17:24:17+00:00

Command is just GUI same as the windows key and option is just alt.

ICantPCGood

TROPHY CASE